Mark Ferrar, Microsoft's national technology officer, has said that its HealthVault online patient record will complement rather than compete with systems provided under the NHS National Programme for IT (NPfIT).

Ferrar said the firm expects to co-exist with NPfIT systems such as the Care Records Service (CRS). He said of HealthVault: "It's a secure technology on the internet that a patient can sign in to and have a richer engagement with a hospital," he says. "There's more complexity in the information on HealthVault than on the CRS.

"It has been used in the US, where different healthcare providers produce different applications to work with it, and I can see that SLaM will probably write applications in HealthVault to help it share information."

Ferrar acknowledged that careful attention has to be paid to the information governance requirements. The platform is subject to the same demands as NPfIT systems and others such as EMIS Web, ensuring that controls are in place to manage the risks in information sharing.

"We've done a significant amount of work in this area and undoubtedly will harvest the learning and share it with other organisations," he says. "It's one of the things we can do to make it more consumable."

Ferrar says that one of his priorities is to develop the understanding of how mutuals or voluntary organisations may help to deliver government services, especially in health and social care, and what is needed in terms of information flows. Microsoft has an eye on local authorities and healthcare bodies as a market for an updated cloud service to be launched later this year.